Gobustan, Azerbaijan - Azerbaijan

Dear lilioftheworld.com reader, here is Lili, your co-editor.

Gobustan (Qobustan) is a small settlement located about 70 km (one hour drive) southwest from Baku city center. This makes it a very good spot for a day trip during your stay in the capital city (you can read more about our experience in Baku here). It is famous for two things: the National Park and the Mud Volcanoes. There are several options to get there from Baku:

Organized day trip excursion – provided by local tour operators. We didn’t choose this option, but from what we have read there are some very good tours. You might decide to check up some reputable tour companies (ask at the reception of your hotel or in some of the travel agencies on the street).
With a self-arranged taxi/driver – this is how we did it. We went there with a driver arranged from our hotel for the total price of 100 Manat, which was supposed to be an all-in (with museum entrance, payment to Gobustan drivers for going to the Mud Volcanoes, other fees). Despite our driver was quite polite it was a first trip to Gobustan for him so everything was a bit improvised: from finding the National Park to hiring a driver to the Mud Volcanoes.
Rent A Car – in general we wouldn’t recommend driving in Azerbaijan as the traffic is somehow hectic and local drivers don’t always act rationally. Further to this you will need a for wheel drive for visiting the Mud Volcanoes.
There is also an option to go with the public transport (LINK), but then you will have to arrange and haggle for the four wheel drive by yourself, which I wouldn’t recommend unless you speak Russian.

Gobustan National Park

The National Park spans over significant territory where you could find thousands of prehistoric rock carvings (called petroglyph drawings). Most of the drawings date back to 5 000 – 20 000 years ago.

The rock carvings are a unique source of information and historical monument like no other. Rightly, it is included in the World Heritage Sites of UNESCO.

When you get to the entrance of the Museum and see the surrounding landscape you get the strange and exciting feeling of being in the cradle of life. This is even before you have seen the first petroglyph.

Gobustan Natuonal Park Museum — *Our ancestors greet us on the entrance of the Museum. In the background you could see what reminds a lot to the scenery from Stanley Kubrick’s Odyssey.*

Gobustan National Park Museum — *Were our ancestors really like this?*

Your first stop is the museum. It isn’t a big one, but the exposition is very interesting and adds to the experience.

Petroglyph drawing of pregnant women — *This petroglyph drawing is showing two pregnant women. It is interesting that the bodies are drawn without head.*

*Petroglyph fragments, very similar to the ones that you will see in the National Park itself.*

The tourist part of the National Park is a couple of kilometers from the Museum. Indeed you can see many petroglyph drawings, showing different scenes of the everyday life of people who lived on Earth thousands of years ago.

*And here they are! Drawn by the hands of people tens of generations before us.*

*The drawings are practically everywhere: some of them are better preserved, others not so well, but it is almost a miracle that so many of them have survived during the ages.*

In addition to the petroglyph drawings, you are rewarded with a wonderful landscape.

Man on the rock Gobustan — *On one of the big hanging rocks, which you will see in the National Park. The Caspian sea shows its best blue color in the background.*

The Mud Volcanoes

Our journey continued to the Mud Volcanoes. The area around Gobustan is home of about 300 out of the world’s total of 700 mud volcanoes.

We needed to switch vehicles to get there as it is an off road drive.

For our surprise we didn’t get a four wheel drive, but our Baku driver arranged an ancient Russia-made Lada, which definitely isn’t a 4X4.

*Have you ever driven such vehicle? It is very difficult to navigate as the steering wheel doesn’t have a hydraulic support and feels heavy as a millstone.*

The drive was a bumpy one. At several occasions we had the feeling that we will just crash. See the following video to get a feeling about the ride 🙂

Yet, we made it to the mud volcanoes! An interesting fact is that some people use the mud for medical purposes. See one of them here:

Rain was coming, so we couldn’t spend long time there. We headed back to continue our wonderful stay in Baku. The trip to Gobustan is a must-do and we can only recommend it. It is worth it even for only half a day. Don’t miss it!